By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 2, 2006

BAGHDAD -- Speeding off to another rebuilding project, Maj. John Hudson of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wheeled out of the driveway of one of his many prides and joys: the headquarters of Iraq's new broadcast regulatory body, a sunlit building with an open floor plan, overlooking the Tigris River.

As Hudson's convoy popped onto the street, an Iraqi driver nearby -- trained to stop dead at the sight of any one U.S. Humvee or two or more sport-utility vehicles -- slammed on his brakes. The Iraqi sat stoically as a car rear-ended his, the crunch of metal audible through the bulletproof windows of Hudson's SUV.

Hudson kept talking about his projects, without spilling a drop from his travel cup of Starbucks coffee, sent from home.

"A lot of the high-end finish materials still have to be imported," Hudson said, referring to the seamlessly laid marble tiles in the new offices of the National Communication and Media Commission. The marble for the $5.2 million offices came from Italy, Hudson presumed.

"Craftsmanship," said Hudson, a blue-eyed 35-year-old from Colorado Springs. "A lot of pride and workmanship in that project."

Later, at an Army Corps of Engineers office in the Green Zone -- the fortified site of much of the Iraqi government -- Hudson, in flak jacket and helmet, spread his hands lovingly on a map of Baghdad. "Two youth centers. Two fire stations -- those are in some of your poorer neighborhoods. Baghdad highway patrol. A facility for the SWAT team. A new perimeter wall for Doura," a power plant in Baghdad's insurgency-ridden south. A checkpoint on a southern road into the city. An electrical substation.

Hudson picked out the sites instantly, his finger stopping on each one. The projects are among 90 under his domain and among 3,600 projects in an $18.4 billion reconstruction package for Iraq due to peak, and be completed, this year.

British private security contractors escorted Hudson on his trip. A siren signaled the coming of the convoy, sending some pedestrians scrambling even as others stubbornly slowed. One vehicle ran interference, guarding against suicide bombers that prowl Baghdad in search of Western convoys. Hudson has had the good fortune never to come close to a bombing, he said, never to hear more than a few gunshots on his visits once or twice a week to work sites.

The broadcast agency headquarters, with a wall of windows opening up to a Tigris River glittering in the morning sun, is easily one of the most beautiful buildings in Baghdad.

"The people working here seem kind of excited about moving in," Hudson noted.

Next stop, a children's hospital. On one side, in the wing not yet touched by the U.S. money and American and Iraqi engineers, mothers in black shrouds and fathers in black leather jackets cradled infants as they stood in the cold to press into a chaotic admitting office. In the dark inside the wing, children lay in arms or on floors, or milled, wailing, in a waiting room.

"Last time I was here they had them in there two at a time," Hudson said, surveying incubators pushed up against a dirty wall, tiny, thin babies lying mute inside. In limited English, Taref Fawdhil, a physician, conceded that some infants here had died from diarrhea and septicemia.

Across the courtyard, workers pushed wheelbarrows and swept up dust in a newly renovated wing of the facility, the first phase of a $2.9 million overhaul of the children's hospital. Project quality supervisor Anmar Abdul Karim pointed to the panels that would deliver oxygen and suction fluids at each bed, to the reverse-osmosis system that would deliver some of the rare clean water in Baghdad, to the placement of a clock in every room so that nurses would know when to hand out medication. Karim was particularly satisfied with an isolation ward, with self-contained ventilation and climate systems that engineers built in part from instructions found on the Internet.

Karim reminded Hudson of the last time when they were on the old side of the hospital, when parents who had brought their child in mistook the Army engineer for a doctor. The baby died, Karim said.

The final stop took Hudson to a women's hospital that will tend more than 300 patients when a $5.75 million renovation is complete. Iraqi hospitals normally are decrepit facilities, with grim paint and mysterious stains. At this hospital, Hudson and project chief Mohammed Hassani pointed out an Internet cafe, a cafeteria and a flower shop.

"No excuse ever now for Iraqi husbands not to grab some flowers before they go upstairs," Hudson said. Distracted, he pointed to a dropped ceiling. "Plumb and flush and straight. They've done a good solid job with them."

Hudson liked it all.

"Even if it's something grubby like a sewage system, I think it's exciting,'' he said.

"Some of these places, we don't even know where the sewage goes. The system's so jury-rigged,'' he said. Fixing it all, he said, "will take years."

Hudson will return to Colorado Springs around March. Money for the U.S. reconstruction package here is scheduled to run out around the end of the year. International donors largely have not kept their pledges to pick up the tab for reconstruction. Iraqis have balked at the painful economic reforms necessary to win foreign loans to do the work. Insurgents want to destroy it all. Civil war would do the same.

"Guys like the doctor give me confidence they're certainly going to do their very best," Hudson said. "We'll have to see how all that stuff works out."